How can your business use Twitter for marketing?

With more than 330 million monthly active users, Twitter represents a vast audience of potential for businesses looking to expand the reach of marketing investment. It’s a platform that is free to use and one that can deliver tangible results, from conversions to web traffic. And yet so many businesses just don’t succeed at Twitter – so how do you use it well when it comes to effective marketing?

Twitter is a reciprocal platform

The key to using Twitter for anything is to understand that the whole platform is driven by interactions. From networking, to brand management and sharing content, the success of every action relies on interactions between users. Even if your Twitter account is a brand, as opposed to an individual, it still needs to behave in a way that enables interaction to take place. So, when you’re considering how to use Twitter for marketing remember:

• Conversational tweets do well. Instead of just posting headlines or facts or images without comments, try to create tweets that are likely to start conversations instead. There are many different ways to do this, from using questions in your tweets, to ensuring that around 40% of what you tweet is a reply to another user, as opposed to purely your own voice.
• Being responsive is crucial. A 2017 Sprout Social survey found that being responsive is one of the top actions on social that will prompt consumers to purchase. If users tweet at you, tweet back, if they favourite and retweet your tweets then do the same for them.

Tweet content is key

You might have mastered the reciprocal and conversational approach to Twitter but it’s also important to make sure that you’re using all content options to market effectively. Today, this means getting to grips with Twitter video, whether it’s Twitter’s native video feature or live streaming. Video is a crucial tool that many marketers are already using with great success – 70% of marketers are confident in their ability to create videos on Twitter that drive purchases, for example.

Organise your approach to optimise your Twitter impact

If you want to see a return on your social marketing investment then you need to get organised.

• Set goals – if you want to know whether your Twitter marketing efforts are working or not then you’ll need to set goals to measure them. This could be generating website traffic or leads or building a following.

• Create a Twitter strategy – when are you going to post on Twitter, how are you going to post and what themes and brand values are going to be key? Integrate Twitter strategy into your broader digital marketing planning to see the best results. In terms of timings, we recommend posting 5 times daily at your users’ most active times.

• Plan ahead – get ahead with your Twitter campaigns so that you’re ready for big social days like Black Friday or Christmas and you’re not trying to pull something together at the last minute. Devise a tweeting schedule that includes key dates that matter to your industry and your audience.

Our team has a great deal of experience with Twitter marketing and wider digital marketing content and strategy – contact us to find out how we might be able to help you grow by giving the Iconic Digital team a call today on 020 7100 0726.